Thursday, December 13, 2012

Don’t you hate using menus on your display? Don’t you wish they had more buttons and weren’t so annoying to use? Well NEC hears your pain and has always had a product called MultiProfiler that puts all of the powerful monitor controls in a nice graphical user interface for your PC or Mac.

Now most people aren’t aware of MultiProfiler because people typically pull their display out of the box, plug it in and move on. Heck, it’s a big deal to get most people to even calibrate their display! However, this app is worth look – but more now than ever before, so even if you’ve used it and dismissed it – check out it out again. Here’s why – they’ve added new keyboard shortcuts for many features that also supports duplicate values so you can press the same keyboard shortcut key to cycle through the choices. For example, below I have it set up where I can do a Ctrl+Alt+Shift+1 to toggle PIP on and off.

Why would I use picture in picture – especially if I only have video source?

That’s exactly what I thought when NEC first told me about this feature, but then they told me something really important – PIP supports whatever input you want – including the same input you use to connect to your computer. That confused me any more because why would I want to see the same thing I see on my main display in a PIP window? How stupid right?

Choose any video input and picture mode you want for PIP

Well, PIP supports different picture modes, so you can have your main display set to full native resolution of the display and the PIP window to use the sRGB color space so you can proof how your images will look on the millions of crappy sRGB only displays out in the real world. This is important too because your perfect image with lots of red information on your nice wide gamut display is going to look way oversaturated on a sRGB display – especially in Internet Explorer.

But Ron, how am I going to see anything in that tiny PIP window?

Once again, MultiProfiler to the rescue – you can set the PIP size to be large which takes up about a quarter of the display, you can position it, and you can even choose different modes like side by side with proper aspect ratio and side by side stretched to fit.

Who cares about sRGB what else can I do?

If you read my PA Series review then you know that you can even create Picture Modes that use your paper profiles as input to soft proof your prints in products that don’t support soft proofing (like older versions of Lightroom before 4.x). This is pretty cool for those doing printing who want an idea of what they’ll get before they hit print.

Seriously Ron, who gives a crap about all that? What else can I use this for?

Did you know that NEC PA Series displays have a built-in KVM Switch? In case you don’t know what that means, consider this – say you have one display, keyboard and mouse yet you want it to work with two computers. How do you do that? Well, you connect each computer to the NEC display and the USB cable from the display to each computer. You then put your one keyboard and mouse into the USB ports on the NEC display and then use the KVM feature to switch inputs so that when you are on the input for PC 1 your keyboard and mouse works on that computer, and when you are input for PC 2 your keyboard and mouse work on that computer too.

Now here’s the cool part – remember that keyboard shortcut feature? Now you can even assign keyboard inputs to your KVM so you don’t have to use the annoying input button to get switched to the display of your choice. In addition, because you can assign the same key to only the values you want, you can have it skip inputs when you hit your hot key so that you only toggle between the inputs you really care about. This is seriously cool!

UPDATE: KVM How To Video

I just got this video from NEC and thought it was pretty helpful:

Conclusion

There’s other cool stuff like support for people with color blindness and more. It’s free for all PA Series owners and most P series owners. How can you go wrong with that? Click here to learn more and download it for your Mac or PC. Try it, you might like it!

Leave a comment to let NEC know what you think about this product and if you have an recommendations or suggestions.